Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2021 20:33:09 GMT -5
Wendy(1/22/2021)
In 2012 Benh Zeitlin came pretty much out of nowhere and earned a (somewhat controversial) Oscar nomination for his debut film Beasts of the Southern Wild and then kind of disappeared for eight years. But in early 2020 he came back with his sophomore effort Wendy, which was met with mixed at best reviews from critics before having its released completely overshadowed by the looming virus and eventually limping out of sight. That’s a bit of a shame because while I’m not the biggest fan of the film either I do think it was somewhat denied its day in court. I must say that the movie had quite the steep hill to climb in order to impress me given that it’s a reworking of the story of “Peter Pan,” which is a bad story that has produced pretty much nothing but garbage from anyone who touches it but this fairly radical re-working is at least interesting. Here it’s moved from Edwardian England to the American South and Never Never Land (which isn’t called that here) is made to be a sort of isolated bayou area that an Afro-Caribbean Peter Pan transports a trailer-trash Wendy and her brothers to but once they get there things stagnate for a while. I must say that for a while there it reminded me a bit of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, a movie that was pretty visually striking but which I found to be something of an endurance test because it was far too interested in just tossing the audience into the fantasy mind of an eight year old and hoping they want to indulge him in his ever goofy fantasy. Similarly here we do get a lot of the lyrical camerawork and musical flights of fancy that made Beasts of the Southern Wild an interesting experience but it lacks an adult character for long stretches to ground some of the more “childhood fantasy” style elements. I might go so far as to suggest that Zeitlin had taken this style about as far as it needed to go with his debut film and that he maybe should have tried something different with his follow-up rather than trying to push things even further. Still, the movie has perhaps stuck with me a bit more than I expected since watching it and I do think of it as a generally noble effort that deserved a bit more leeway than it got.
**1/2 out of Five
In 2012 Benh Zeitlin came pretty much out of nowhere and earned a (somewhat controversial) Oscar nomination for his debut film Beasts of the Southern Wild and then kind of disappeared for eight years. But in early 2020 he came back with his sophomore effort Wendy, which was met with mixed at best reviews from critics before having its released completely overshadowed by the looming virus and eventually limping out of sight. That’s a bit of a shame because while I’m not the biggest fan of the film either I do think it was somewhat denied its day in court. I must say that the movie had quite the steep hill to climb in order to impress me given that it’s a reworking of the story of “Peter Pan,” which is a bad story that has produced pretty much nothing but garbage from anyone who touches it but this fairly radical re-working is at least interesting. Here it’s moved from Edwardian England to the American South and Never Never Land (which isn’t called that here) is made to be a sort of isolated bayou area that an Afro-Caribbean Peter Pan transports a trailer-trash Wendy and her brothers to but once they get there things stagnate for a while. I must say that for a while there it reminded me a bit of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, a movie that was pretty visually striking but which I found to be something of an endurance test because it was far too interested in just tossing the audience into the fantasy mind of an eight year old and hoping they want to indulge him in his ever goofy fantasy. Similarly here we do get a lot of the lyrical camerawork and musical flights of fancy that made Beasts of the Southern Wild an interesting experience but it lacks an adult character for long stretches to ground some of the more “childhood fantasy” style elements. I might go so far as to suggest that Zeitlin had taken this style about as far as it needed to go with his debut film and that he maybe should have tried something different with his follow-up rather than trying to push things even further. Still, the movie has perhaps stuck with me a bit more than I expected since watching it and I do think of it as a generally noble effort that deserved a bit more leeway than it got.
**1/2 out of Five
